Too poor to fuck.

It's official.

My pill just went up to fifty dollars. That's with my insurance. See, my insurance only covers generics for ortho products; I'm not on an ortho. I'm on yasmin. It's a lovely monophasic pill that comes in a fake purple suede cover and costs more than a gym membership, cable, my phone bill, or groceries.

My nurse practitioner never told me why I'm on yasmin, and not what I was on before, a generic that cost me ten dollars a month, or something else that would be affordable. I can't ask her, because last time I went in, I was charged 230 dollars in lab fees that my insurance doesn't cover. Also known as most of my rent.

There is a there are two three problems with this. One. A person should be able to afford prescription medications. Two, a person should be told why they are prescribed one medication over another, and, if there is an economic or personal reason to choose another pill, that should be heard. Three. If the pill were available without all those fucking tests, maybe I wouldn't be having to decide whether to take my pill tonight, or save this pill pack, to make my prescription stretch until I can afford a pap smear again.

It is so fucking expensive to be a woman.

Women's clothes are more expensive, and more cheaply made. Women are expected to look cleaner and smoother than men, despite having relatively similar distributions of sebacious glands, and a similar epidermis. This requires a hell of a lot of fucking money. Women need to own more clothes. More shoes. More things, period. And we're brainwashed into thinking, feeling, beleiving that shopping is fun. Are there more things for women to buy because women want to buy more things, or are women buying more things because there are more things for women to buy?

I own mascara. Eyeshadow. Nail polish. Hair dye. Face wash. Exfoliating face wash. Body wash. Moisturizer with and without spf. Razors. Depilatories. Contraceptive pills. Deodorant. Powders. Foundation. Lipstick. Lip gloss. Lip stain. Tweezers for my eyebrows. Separate tweezers for splinters. Nail files. And I'll never know exactly how to use that arsenal to manufacture a consistently innoffensive facade.

My boyfriend owns soap and condoms. And toothpaste.

If men are clean, entirely clean, they meet expectations. Women need more; whether it's for men or women's eyes- they need more. Clean and hairless and current and smooth and pert.

On top of these crap expenses, that any sensible hippy, lesbian, camper, or poverty stricken barista knows in her heart that she can do without, there are the real costs of being a woman.

Pap smears, every year. STD screenings, whether you want them or not. Contraception, and the consequences of not using contraception. A man can live his life in any manner he sees fit, without ever seeing a doctor. A woman is lead to believe that without once-yearly undercarriage maintenance, she will die or lose the ability to have children.

And that's always the way they put it. You may die, or become infertile. Slickly sliding that infertility jab in there, as if a woman may play fast and loose with her own health, (and not believe that getting poked in the vagina by a professional once a year really has a significant protective effect not found in amateur vaginal proddings), but if she can't have some fat, drooling baby produced by her very own cooter and cooter annex, life is really over.

"Don't you want to be tested for STD's? You could get PID and become INFERTILE?"

"You need a pap smear, or you'll DIE!"

1. Fine. Good. Get me some chlamydia. Immediately. I want the clap. I will leave it for a long time. Until my organs get all crusty with scar tissue. Then I won't need the pill anymore. And it will be very cost-effective.

2. No.
Thank you, very much, but I'm able to judge my own risk factors for cervical cancer. As I don't smoke, have no family history, and have only had one partner- my risk is very low. Not absent, but very low. Close to my risk of colon cancer, as meat eater only recently on a high fiber diet, with a family history of polyps and cancer in that area. Lower, probably. But you don't want me to present my camera up the ass card to get a burger at McDonalds, do you?

Ivy League Trash.

My boyfriend and I walked around the east side of providence. We thought it would be fun to photograph things like this forty ounce malt liquor, which we found, just as pictured, nestled near the ivy-covered halls of Brown.

Olde English 800. 40 ounces of escape, reasonably priced and available at package and convenience stores in neighborhoods much discussed, but never visited, by Brown students.

No matter who bought it or drank it, whether out of a desperate need to divest sobriety inexpensively, or out of shrunken-tee'd, skinny jean'd, bright sneaker'd irony, it was left just as we found it: Trash of the ivy league.

Which brings me to Kaavya. A 19 year old Harvard sophomore, she's recently been caught plagiarizing her first novel, a teen lit-piece that was first thought to be semi-autobiographical and is now known to be a high-strung, overdone, overwrought retread of a similar novel, with a jaunty subcontinental flavor.

Her parents paid up to twenty thousand dollars to get her into Harvard. A set of coincidences hooked her up with book packagers- author handlers that turn an attractive person of any talent level into a hot property. Privilege potentiates privilege. And the location of that potentiation is the ivy league.

Harvard. Brown. Yale. Occasionally, the children of the middle and lower classes get onto these nepotism factories, but that only serves to perpetuate the illusion of a meritocracy. The poorer you are, the less likely it is that you'll get into an ivy league school. The poorer you are, the less likely it is that if you'll get in, you'll finish.

Her parents so wanted to secure her a place in the class I can only assume they occupy themselves, they spent tens of thousands of dollars on consultants. They had the connections to help her get an agent, and get their attractive, ethnically distinctive, charming daughter to the right handlers to get her a very lucrative book deal. She had everything going for her. Everything other people- regardless of talent, ability, or skill, would kill to have. And none of it, other than the workmanlike manner in which, I'm sure, she got the grades and test scores that got her in the door- was a product of her striving. It was a product of connections and consultants. Her edge was not her own.

I'm smart. I'm driven. I'm a super writer (!). I'm talented. I'm graduating from a third-rate university, skin peeling off my hands from work. My classmates from my third-rate liberal arts college have faired not much better; those who came in with connections left and met with success. Those who had no connections left and went to work for the New York City Public Schools. Talent had nothing to do with it. I have friends who could write a screenplay that would blow Sofia Coppola's ass out through her pussy; but they don't have famous daddies. Or even rich ones.

It's hard to know what Kaavya's intent was. She may have genuinely been stressed out, and recapitulated bits of someone else's work. She may have thought she wouldn't get caught; although, I recommend Harvard add a course in common sense and reading comprehension if that is true. When one plagiarizes, one should pick a novel more than five years old, and one without a sequel currently on the best seller list. She may have wanted to get caught. She may have not wanted to write a novel, and not known how to get out of it. She may have been misled by handlers.

It's easy to know what the problem is: there is no reward for merit or talent in this society. Connections matter first. Knowing someone gets you in the door; it doesn't guarantee success. However, this is no great comfort to those waiting in the hall. I will never be a writer, or an artist, or an actress, or a journalist, or anything with any specific cachet. These careers are too attractive to the children of the rich and powerful to be available to any but a lucky few of the children of middle class. Also, I'm too fat for like, three of those careers.

I've given up on writing, lately. It's too hard to be told that you do something well, and have to explain to people why it doesn't matter.

I wonder if Kaavya values the things she does well, whatever they are. Poor girl. She's been consulted and packaged and marketed for years now. I wonder if she shits by committee. I wonder if she wipes by consensus. I hope she isn't able to parlay this plagiarism into success in any field. I hope she learns from this, and finds something entirely satisfying to her, that she doesn't even want to take short cuts in- and does that.

Third Acceptance In

Drake University School of Law.

Full scholarship. All three years.

Why yes, I am planning to go to the only law school that didn't offer me a full scholarship. What do you think about that?

Women and children.

Women and children.

People can't seem to be able to differentiate between these groups. I'm watching a Penn and Teller show on legalizing prostitution. Most of the anti-prostitution groups seem to believe that if prostitution becomes legal, children will be forced into prostitution, or young girls will be forced into the lifestyle.

A lot of the anti-legalization energy that does not confuse adult women with children comes from two camps: economic and feminist. The economic camp are basically classic nimbys. They don't want prostitution, gambling, adult video stores or all-night diners anywhere near them, because it might bring down their property values, bring in an unsightly element, or might lead to uncomfortable conversations with children, when they catch sight of an unfamiliar business establishment.

The second camp is the feminists. Feminists see prostitution as an instance of female exploitation. And it is. In most of the world, prostitution is a degrading, dehumanizing state. It is commonly forced. Sex slavery occurs. Children are sold, male and female. In the United States, women addicted to drugs, impoverished, or otherwise open to exploitation may become prostitutes by economic coercion. They become virtual slaves to pimps. This is wrong. Both situations are very wrong; however, because a situation exists in which people are vulnerable to exploitation does not mean that a similar situation may exist where no person is exploited. Their second argument is that if prostitution exists, women who are destitute, undereducated, or naive will be forced into that life out of necessity.

One of the miraculous, lovely, wonderful things in the United States is that, by and large, our laws and legal system protect workers from exploitation. Even in the garment industry, mining, and farming industries, where many workers are exploited world-wide, the United States manages to create a climate of safety relative to developing countries, and manages to balance business and individual interests better than many E.U countries. We've got this labor law shit down.

It could be argued that legalization of prostitution in the United States would extend that climate of safety to sex workers. Which would be a good thing.

Safety + People = Something I like.

It could also be argued that women would be no more forced into prostitution than other relatively unskilled professions, such as garment manufacture, food service, and home health services. Women without skills will always be more prone to filling the physical needs of others than men without skills or women with skills; whether that need is sexual or medical should be a choice that a woman can make. Home health services are grimy, often demeaning jobs. They, like prostitution, are a shunting off of personal relationships onto professionals. Health aides turn the elderly, to prevent bed sores. They change the diapers of the profoundly retarded. They wipe stomas. They empty colostomy bags. This job seems much more horrible, to me, than providing sexual services. I couldn't do it. However, it is one of the jobs available to unskilled women, and taken largely by recent immigrants and the similarly disenfranchised.

I'd rather give handjobs than wipe somebody's grandpa's ass- wouldn't you?